small thoughts about a small site

Monday, apr. 10, 2006   |   0 comments

This past week I’ve been working on putting together a miniature website for the Language of Sleep book. It’s been a good six or eight years since I’ve even thought about designing a site, and my web know-how is definitely very “1998” (and not in the good “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea“ sense but the bad “These Are Special Times“ sense…though lord knows I have a special hole in my heart for Celine Dion, much as I do for the <td> tag). So I decided that maybe it was time to finally step up to stylesheets? Ugh? After endless fiddling, and many failures, and much badgering of my more advanced web friends (Gene and Mike bearing the most painful brunt of it), I finally managed to cobble something together. It’s a very small site, just five pages wide, which seems embarrassingly scant considering the effort. And it isn’t going to win any design awards, and I’m sure if you viewed my source (careful! that’s how web people get pregnant!), you’d be scandalized by the Frankenstein of code. But it loads on all my browsers on all my computers, including the Sidekick, and who knew how happy just that could make me?

Also I’d forgotten how much I liked the puttering — selecting link colors, FTPing things over and over again, reloading pages, cleaning and shrinking things in Photoshop, viewing other people’s source, and searching the web for how to do baby stuff like “put space between columns.”

And then there’s that particularly dynamite sensation of having a page keep breaking and breaking, and you just can’t figure out what’s wrong, and you’re going nutso trying to find the problem, combing over this mess of nested tags and moving things around and retyping words, but nothing seems to work. Finally, finally, FINALLY you find it: oh, you typed a “-” instead of an “=” and that’s all it took to make the whole world explode. There’s almost nothing like it, that scratched-itch relief of locating and correcting something so small. Finding the exact right analogy for a complicated thought is almost as good, or getting yourself the exact right meal to meet a highly particular craving. Maybe doctors or dieticians feel it, when they finally come up with the right treatment for a thorny and chronic health problem? But key to the greatness of the sensation is the huge buildup of inscrutable frustration that comes before it. It’s like…when I was a kid, in the summer, I used to wear my down jacket to the pool just to heighten the relief and glee of the moment when I finally jumped in the water. This is the glory of building a webpage!

looking forward to looking back

Monday, mar. 6, 2006   |   0 comments

So Friday I was a guest on Suncoast Magazine, which is a morning talk radio show on Florida’s “Sunny 1220.” Have I mentioned that my life is a little weird these days? With the NY Post thing, plus a small (and I’m pretty sure embarrassing?) interview that I did with I.D. this past Monday, plus a scattering of other small maybablies and possiwonts that are all floating out there, which I’m simultaneously hoping will and won’t happen. Also, I got advanced copies of the book! It’s cute and small and beautiful and scary, see:

I’m trying to enjoy it all of it, I really am, but when I’m not actively focusing on being thrilled, I’m pretty much low-level nervous at all times these days. The sensation, I’ve decided, is what I call “looking forward to looking back.”

Anyway the reason they had me on this radio show was to chat up Welcome to Wisteria Lane, which is a book of essays about Desperate Housewives that I contributed to. I was pretty sure that nobody I knew would hear the show, since it isn’t archived anywhere and I don’t think I know anyone currently living in Sarasota, Florida, but nonetheless, I was (surprise) totally panicked by the idea of being on the radio. I spent the whole night before poring over a PDF printout of the book that the publisher sent me (all of the other essays in the book are really, really great). I took notes, I made lists, I underlined passages, I stuck stickies all over the place. And wow, how happy was I when I realized, just before heading off to sleep, that the call-time was at 11.05am eastern standard time, as in at 8.05 my time? So happy! That would have been so bad and sad.

Anyway so I have to call in to the station at 8am, so I wake up at…4am. Ding! I can’t even remotely go back to sleep, so I decide to do some research about the person doing my interview, and I find this amazing list of all the week’s guests: my name’s there, and then a bunch of people I don’t recognize, and then…Chuck Norris! And? Rich Little!!! My name, on a list, with Rich Little! At that point I was totally melting down — sweating, mouth-breathing, pitty-pat heart — so I call Kristin Windbigler, and she talked to me, very calmly, about how it’ll be over soon, how great I’m going to do, etcetera. But then she admits that if it were her, she’d totally be weeping. Exactly! I just kept thinking, why does this phase me so much? Did the Texas Ranger get up at 4am in a panic over his talk-radio chat? Somehow, I can’t see it. And yet! And yet.

Eventually, though, the moment arrives, and I breath and breath and call the number they gave me. The show’s host, Doug, answers the phone, and he is so talk radio, all smooth voiced and awake. They’re not quite ready to talk to me, he tells me, so he puts me on hold. While I wait, I’m listening to Doug and his copilot doing their banter. “Welcome back to the second half of the show,” Doug says, and then, “Weren’t those barber-shoppers GREAT?” Apparently, in the first half of the show, they had a bunch of local barbershop quartet guys on the show. So then Doeg goes, “I couldn’t do it — can’t carry a tune — I can’t even do karaoke.” And the other guy says something about how all it takes is the right amount of alcohol, etc. And then Doug asks, “Does anyone even do karaoke anymore? Is the fad over yet?” And his sidekick says, “Oh, the ORIENTALS they JUST LOVE IT!”

And with that, Doug says, “Speaking of entertainment, how about that Desperate Housewives show?” And they click me through, and I talk and talk, and then suddenly fifteen minutes have passed and I’m done and I don’t really remember what I said at all because I was basically in a blackout panic. I just really hope that, whatever it was that I said, all the orientals out there loved it.